My Journey So far.
Having begun coding two years ago at sixteen I am very much a begginner and am still at the start of my journey. However this has not withheld me from learning the hard truth that programming takes time. Mistakes and wrong paths have impeded the process but have also made me all the wiser. So I thought I would gift you all with some insight into some errors made in my still early career. Im sure a lot of these will sound familiar.
The slow process of how it all began
Being sixteen I never had an urgency to be job ready nor had the drive to schedule or even monitor my learning. I was just a kid who noticed how much time was wasted playing GTA during lockdown and thought I would try learn something. Now this is no way a bad thing, if theres no need to hurry then theres no need to hurry. But boy did I take my time, I was coding without understanding and then repeating and repeating it over again without gaining any understanding of what I was truly doing. I would say it took me two months and a half to understand the basics of python.
Now this is no way representative of the slow process of learning this skill but the intention of this piece is to conceptualize two things:
- Every journey is unique some are much longer than others
- The videos or articles teaching you to be job ready in 3 months or learn express.js in 10 minutes is just bs
Bitting off more than I could chew
This is all too familiar. After just having learnt python basics I dived head first into the big black box that is AI. I bought books, courses watched videos I did it all. For three months I went into the depths of machine learning, ANNs, RNNs, CNNs I did it all without realizing it was going over my head. Now I am not saying that time was wasted, I will still able to appreciate the elegance and genius of the concepts but I just wasnt experienced enough to implement it. Long Story short — make sure you know your languages and ideas before you jump into the deep end. It is very easy to get excited and jump ahead but in the long run you are just slowing the process.
Interruptions
Once again not my fault I promise. In Australia year 12 at school consumes every waking hour making it harder to balance its importance and my love for programming. So I took a break. In no way do I regret this because coding became a distraction from school, but that 6 month break decayed my understanding significantly. I had to remind myself of basic syntax and new concepts I was learning, needless to say it was hard to start up again. But this is normal (at least thats what Im telling myself) everyone has interruptions everyone gets distracted or loses motivation.
Tutorial Hell
Im not going to go into depth with this one, we all know what it is and anyone who hasn’t been there is lying. Tutorial hell is the endless loop of courses, books, videos and tutorials that fill us with a false sense of accomplishment that cannot match real world practise and experience. Im not going to act all high and mighty and say I have rid myself of it because In a way im still there. However this black hole delays so much learning and consumes so much time with such minimal progress.
In short, though every ones learning trajectory is subjective, programming takes time and more often than not, short cuts and mistakes only lengthen the process. The truth is setting unrealistic goals to learn in short time frames do more damage than good. Yet thats not to say scheduling and measuring goals should not be done. But take it slow, make mistakes, learn from them and keep learning.
